5 tips for building world-class omnichannel customer service

As a marketer, you must be aware that most of your competitors are deploying omnichannel customer service systems. In case you struggle to engage and nurture your clientele with the traditional approach to customer support, it’s time to deploy a foolproof omnichannel customer support strategy. 

Do you know that businesses with omnichannel customer engagement tactics succeed in retaining 89% of their customers? Well, these figures speak tons about why successful brands deploy omnichannel chat tools, social media customer service, and messaging platforms.

Simply put, omnichannel customer service involves offering several options to your customers so that they can connect to your business through multiple channels. Before delving into the strategies for building omnichannel customer service, let’s take a look at these statistics.

Omnichannel customer service statistics every business owner should know

• • As much as 73% of customers love to shop around through more than one channel
  • Omnichannel customers are 30% more valuable than customers shopping through a single channel
  • 90% of retail business owners acknowledge the value of omnichannel strategies
  • 77% of companies with omnichannel strategies succeed in storing customer data across different channels
  • The opportunity cost of failing to have an omnichannel customer strategy in place is 10% in terms of lost revenue

No wonder, why forward-thinking businesses use omnichannel chat support tools for retaining customers.

Delivering a robust omnichannel customer service

Businesses operating in the eCommerce sector should deploy a foolproof omnichannel customer service mechanism. Here, we have outlined five strategies to build a world-class system for leveraging your revenue.

1. Capitalize on customer data

Amidst digitized business dynamics, customer data happens to be the most valuable currency. Deploying data analytics, businesses need to generate valuable insights that would power their marketing and customer engagement strategies. A careful assessment of your customer data can bestow you with a comprehensive knowledge of their purchasing habits. Once you know what they expect, it’s possible to fine-tune your communication messages across different channels as you provide customer support.

Now, it’s imperative to offer a consistent customer experience across different channels. This requires you to bank on the customer data resources handy for all your agents. In an omnichannel help desk, customer data should be consistent across chat, email, phone calls, SMS, and social media platforms. This includes the shipping address, customer’s name, past conversations, order history, reviews, and loyalty points.

Businesses also need to deploy the right tools to distribute the knowledge resources across every channel. This way, customers need not repeat their queries when they switch to a different channel. Banking on data, your agents can deliver a more personalized experience to your customers when they reach out to you. Also, successful brands automate their customer support techniques using AI omni channel chatbots.

2. Evaluate why each customer support channel is important

 This strategy involves evaluating the reasons that make each customer support channel unique. Many businesses provide customer service across several digital channels. However, in the first place, it’s imperative to understand how each of these channels operates. Accordingly, you can strike an equation where you can make all the channels work together. Also, your agents would be better poised to use the right channel for the most suitable instance of communication.

For instance, your customers might find an omnichannel chat tool beneficial if they need to reach out to you at odd hours when you have limited human agents active. Once the bot initiates the conversation, one of your representatives can follow it up. Next, if the customer needs human assistance, you can count on omnichannel live chat platforms. Again, if the matter needs serious explanation, you can switch to voice calls. For documentation purposes, email communication continues to be the most reliable form of conversation.

However, take care that switching communication channels too frequently is not recommended. Prioritize the need of the hour and the comfort of your customers while deploying the relevant channel. Your agents need to make the call based on the customer status, urgency, and the nature of the channel.

3. Deploy a unified customer support platform to centralize conversations

Initially, enterprises using omnichannel customer support strategies encountered a challenge. Their agents had to switch between different apps like Facebook, email, or other messaging platforms to notify each customer.

However, with omnichannel messaging platforms evolving, these platforms now perfectly sync with advanced tools. Using these tools, you can unify different platforms to centralize the conversations with your customers. Currently, customer support solutions or software are available in the market. Businesses can also use an integrated messaging platform from eServeCloud omnichannel to centralize data into a user-friendly dashboard. So, even when your agents switch communication channels, they would be informed about the past interactions between your customers and brand through other platforms. This eventually leverages productivity and customer experience.

Here are some additional guidelines that should prove handy for you.

• Minimize tab-shuffling: Be strategic while choosing a helpdesk tool, ensuring that it pulls customer data from different eCommerce platforms. In the process, your agents will be able to check this data, recommend products, or modify orders as required. This also implies that your agents need not deal with multiple tabs to assist your customers. As a result, you can bail your agents out of the trouble of shuffling between Shopify, Facebook, Gmail, and other apps.
• Unifying data of customers: When a customer reaches out to you, the person expects the agent to be aware of their past conversations, chats, and purchase history. Use suitable tools to unify your customer data, so that they get integrated across all the channels like email, social media, and SMS.

Lastly, streamline the process by deploying smart automation tools. Currently, these tools come with AI features that can prioritize and deflect tickets. As a result, your customers can receive an instant response to frequently asked questions. Your agents would also remain better poised to find opportunities to upsell products.

4. Bank on automation to manage workload and improve response time

Thanks to AI tools, customer support teams can enjoy the privilege of automating mundane and repetitive tasks. This way, you can streamline your workflow and manage your tasks with competence. Currently, successful brands are using automated customer support tools where you can provide instant responses related to order locations. Also, these tools provide answers to frequently asked questions instantly, reducing the need for human involvement.

Also, deploying AI can help brands feel their customer’s pulse. Accordingly, they can provide personalized and accurate responses. Using automation tools brings you a double-edged benefit. Firstly, you can pacify your operations and reduce the response time to resolve issues. Next, your customer support agents can breathe easy as they aren’t burdened with these FAQs and repetitive questions. This also reduces the number of tickets, enabling agents to work on their priorities.

Currently, with omnichannel social media customer service in place, you can integrate AI-backed bots on social media platforms as well. These informal platforms of communication work wonders as most customers engage on social media during their leisure hours.

5. Integrate self-service resources

Self-service resources include automated chatbots, FAQ pages, blogs, and other knowledge resources. These resources enable customers to find answers to questions that are common to others as well. Once they find the desired information, they wouldn’t create an additional ticket. Successful businesses identify the commonly asked questions and general problems of their customers using smart analytics. Accordingly, they create blogs, articles, and FAQ pages to offer instant responses to similar questions.

Information from Microsoft reveals that 66% of your customers prefer trying these self-service resources. Once they fail to elicit relevant data, they reach out to the customer service team. Also, 88% of your customers want you to provide information through a self-service portal.

Therefore, having self-service resources on your website eases up the customer experience. Even when your agents aren’t active, these resources continue to serve your customers with relevant information.

Currently, businesses can deploy different types of self-service resources. These include:

• Self-service menus, enabling customers to track orders, cancel orders, return products, and get answers to their questions without raising a ticket.
• Help centers or knowledge bases, where your customers can go through a library of blogs and articles to obtain relevant information.
• Customer communities, where your customers participate in conversations that are visible to everyone in the forum, and thereby they can resolve similar issues.

Conclusion

Now that you are on the hunt for a robust omnichannel customer support tool, make sure that it offers the following features.

• A centralized dashboard for customer support to engage with customers across multiple channels on a single platform.
• Strategic integrations with different messaging platforms and live-chat widgets
• Automated workflow builder backed by AI to provide instant responses to common questions from your customers.

Check the best tools out there on the market to streamline your customer support strategy. With the recommended guidelines in place, you can streamline your customer experience to leverage your brand value and revenue.